Joe Stramaglia III

Game Design Leader

Hey there! Below you can see some small snippets of my experiences. If you want to dig a little deeper, please download a copy of my resume and contact me . I love talking about my work, and would love to talk to you about yours.

Games - Industry

Supersocial

Lead Game Designer

February 2021 - February 2022

About: A start-up company with a focus on the metaverse. Built primarily games on the Roblox platform with industry professionals as well as platform experts.
Role: Lead Game Designer

What is it?: Ghostopia is a spooky cool role-playing game where you decorate and build up a haunted mansion for your Ghosts. It's Animal Crossing meets Runescape in a Tim Burton-esque world!

My experience: Worked with the co-founder and creative director to synthesize her vision into game design. I produced content, designed feature specs, owned the core loop, and implemented the design for those features, as well as balanced a robust economy. Developed my own tools and workflows that were later adopted laterally across the company. Was an active force in the community, spending lots of time in game with players and using their feedback in real-time to improve the game's quality.

Favorite Contribution: We had a very short deadline regarding an event collaboration with The Addams Family 2 movie launch, with the limited tools we had I was able to create a small event that players of all types could participate in. It was a challenge but one that felt like it paid off.
Rogue Mythos
Unnanounced Brand Game
Unnanounced Web3 Game

Role: Lead Game Designer

What is it?: I transitioned into a shared resource between all of these games to help them develop their economies, monetization, features and general design support.

My experience: I built design tools, workflows, mentored teams on a daily basis in regards to all aspects of design as appropriate for their various progress within the development cycle. I worked directly with the Principal Designer and leadership to develop pitches for various potential partnerships and explorations into the web3 space.

Favorite Contribution: This is a bit harder to quantify, but my best contributions here were actually in terms of mentorship for these teams. It was a very fulfilling experience to help others get into the right mindset to make good design decisions and to work with them to build on top of their foundations.
AppLovin / Machine Zone

Game Designer

February 2019 - February 2021

About: I designed games at MZ for around 2 years. I ramped up incredibly quickly even going so far as to train up other incoming designers in less than 4 weeks. I had a hand in features that touched all of our products including Final Fantasy XV, Game of War, Mobile Strike, and World War Rising as well as other unreleased titles.
Role: Game Designer

What is it?: World War Rising is an Isometric 4X genre game on mobile with an old war/alternate history aesthetic.

My experience: I produced content, designed feature specs and implemented the data for those features, worked on balancing a very robust economy and combat system. Developed my own tools and workflows while also integrating others.

Favorite Contribution: I designed one of the most popular game modes that we have ran in the game, which is often requested by players but we only run it seasonally.
Unnanounced Mobile Title

Role: Game Designer

What is it?: After Machine Zone was acquired by AppLovin I transitioned to a role that was supporting game design on our entire portfolio. I maintained my duties working on World War Rising but began creating designs that would impact all of our games.

My experience: I produced content, designed feature specs and implemented the data for those features, worked on balancing a very robust economy and combat system. Developed my own tools and workflows while also integrating others.

Favorite Contribution: I developed a suite of design tools for recurring events and content that significantly decreased production time allowing designers to spend more time designing and less time implementing their designs.
Synapse Games

Project Lead, Game Designer

August 2014 - Febuary 2019

About: I made great games at Synapse Games Incorporated for almost 5 years. I am very proud of my achievements and most of the 1000+ cards I have designed for them. I always push for quality, and it shows.
Role: Project Lead and Game Designer

What is it?: Tyrant Unleashed is a mobile strategy collectible card game set in a sci-fi/horror universe.

My experience: I lead the team, handled management tasks, monetization (design, implementation, and analysis), and the direction of the game as a whole. Additionally I designed cards (names, stats, skills, and more), wrote narrative, designed systems, and did just about everything design related in some capacity.

Favorite Contribution: I built a couple small Alternate Reality Game puzzles that related to some really fun community events in the game.
Role: Game Designer

What is it?: Spellstone is a fantasy mobile strategy collectible card game with lots of charm.

My experience: I designed cards (names, stats, skills etc.), assisted with systems design, raid content and monetization design.

Favorite Contribution: I created the first cards in the highest rarity in the game (Mythics!). The process of the card design, the content you needed to beat to get them, and the method of acquisition are a shining example of my game design skills.
Role: Game Designer

What is it?: Animation Throwdown: The Quest for Cards is a hit mobile strategy collectible card game with characters from Family Guy, Futurama, Bob's Burgers, King of the Hill and American Dad.

My experience: I assisted in pre-production primarily in systems design, but also consulted the team about content and use of intellectual property.

Favorite Contribution: While I cannot take all the credit for the awesome combo system, I did design with a vital iteration that improved user experience, clarity, and fun-factor related to this core piece of the game.
Role: Game Designer

What is it?: Castaway Cove is an incremental idle game set in a far off island, collect survivors, build more ways to accumulate the currency of the island - sanddollars!

My experience: I assisted in pre-production primarily in systems design and mechanics, but also consulted the team about content and use of intellectual property.

Favorite Contribution: Devised a system to create events that functioned like live operations but were scheduled and created very quickly much further in advance that allowed easily creating more event content with minimal overhead.
Role: Game Designer

What is it?: Global Assault is a unique blend of strategy and turn-based RPG mechanics. Command a squadron and fight all over the world against the enemy forces!

My experience: General design support in balancing, content, and narrative

Favorite Contribution: Boss design sessions were a lot of fun, we came up with some really cool ways to change the game for big moments.
Role: Game Designer

What is it?: Rift Heroes was an experimental project we used as a basis for developing on other future projects. It was a mix of hero battler and 4X strategy, complete with base building, hero collection, missions, and more.

My experience: I designed the economy and built tools to change it rapidly, including a responsive quest design system that generated quests based off of activities that could be completed in game. In this game we a/b tested EVERYTHING, including the gameplay systems like combat - we made essentially 5 versions of the same game but radically different gameplay and pitted them against eachother.

Favorite Contribution: This was my first foray into building google sheet tools for design, and while I've learned a lot since I did the ones I built there, they were incredibly robust and made updating design a breeze.
Role: Game Designer

What is it?: TMNT: Mutant Madness was somewhat of a sister project to Rift Heroes, a lot of the early design work I did on Rift Heroes was also applied here.

My experience: Pre-production design, mechanics, and concept. The game changed pretty radically over the time from my departure to release but you can still see some influence those early designs had on the game.

Favorite Contribution: Overall I would say the battle system that ended up winning in Rift Heroes is pretty much the battle system we used here and I had a big hand in advocating and pushing the design for that system.
NetherRealm Studios

Quality Assurance Engineer

January 2013 - March 2013

About: I was brought on to assist with the Quality Assurance team for a final push to gold for one of the team's most successful releases.
Role: Quality Assurance Analyst

What is it?: Injustice Gods Among Us is an awesome fast paced fighting game with DC Heroes such as Batman, Superman, and many other properties.

My experience: I was brought on during the final months of production during the crunch to release the game. I learned many processes, certification requirements, likely pitfalls of development and assisted developers in the finding, reporting, and debugging of issues with the game.

Favorite Contribution: Highest critical bug reports (game breaking) on the team during my time there, also convinced design to put a company inside joke into the game. Ask me about this one :).

Games - Personal

Role: Game Designer / UX Designer

What is it?: Mechanice was a student project built for a experimental class in augmented reality game design.

My experience: I was a core member of the team that built out the initial concept and design, as we moved into production I primarily focused on user experience and interaction within the augmented reality space.

Favorite Contribution: The concept of using a cube was my original idea for the project and it stayed throughout the entirety of development.
Role: Technical Game Designer

What is it?: Suits is a cooperative heist game set in a casino, taking the best parts of Ocean's 11. It was my Senior Capstone project.

My experience: Throughout pre-production I helped design many of the mechanics of the game as well as the initial level designs. As the project furthered into development I took a deep dive into Scaleform and the design and implementation of all our User Interface.

Favorite Contribution: I had built the entirety of our menu system from scratch, and it worked great in except I couldn't get it to load the level due to some (at the time) properitary information obfuscation, so I took the whole thing and smashed it into the working menu that UDK came with, essentially rebuilding my design within someone else's codebase.
Role: Team Lead and Design Lead

What is it?: Mack Vs Windows is an unfortunately named puzzle platformer that made use of awesome physics and interesting concepts. It was the official DePaul University entry into the 2011 Independent Games Festival.

My experience: This game went through more iterations than anything I have ever worked on, though due to time constraints, and various other factors it didn't quite meet expectations - but it still was finished. I took my first steps into a leadership position on this game, working on everything from concept to completion in coordination with a very large team of 18 students.

Favorite Contribution: While I realize it is silly, I am the only voice actor in the game. Its as terrible as you might imagine but it makes me smile every time I think of it.
Role: Game Designer

What is it?: Flutterfly was a mobile game about the circle of life that was originally created for the Global Game Jam in 2011. It won the Judge's Choice Award at my location.

My experience:This game is somewhat unique as its the only one I was the sole designer for on a team of 8. It's original design was made in 2 days of blood, sweat, and tears. Afterwards we did touch it up a bit so that we could release it into the wild, but its a good example of the early days of my design work compressed into a lightning fast deliverable. It is also the only time I have worked on a game with a procedrual design.

Favorite Contribution: It is hard to pick one since its all very valuable to me, but I think my favorite contribution is the core concept of dying on purpose. At the time it was pretty backwards for a runner game that you wanted to hit many of the hazards.